The last couple of days I am pondering on this thought. What is the difference between managing a department and managing an IT department? And I do think than on most accounts there is not much difference at all. Managing IT is not that different from managing anything else. So, as far as laws of management do exist, they apply to IT as well. The added advantage of IT in general is that the main working is dominated by machines. And managing those are pretty straight forward. That is, if you can keep the IT engineers away from them.

So, why bother with ITIL, COBIT or any other propriety IT management framework? Good old Drucker should be sufficient enough. Unfortunate that is not really the case. Because first of all running IT has more to do with managing expectations than actually running systems itself, it is not that straightforward. And second of all the people responsible for the systems keep on confusing the technical specifications for the the actual business value of ICT. It is not in the technology itself but in its application. So, there are multiple levels of depth to managing ICT services and people.

Many consultants trained in business management seem to be lost when talking to the IT staff, they do not compute the local lingo of the engineers. And many engineers are lost in the mist when trying to explain what they do to business management. Managing IT has thus elements of management theories in general, but with a unique local flavor. That is something worth investigating and expanding upon. And that is what I am planning to do in the coming period.